Poemen in the Monastic Memory of East and West

Before the schism of East and West, the Apophthegmata Patrum — and Poemen’s dossier at its heart — was the common reading of the whole monastic Church. In the East it became the bedrock of Byzantine and Slavic ascetic literature, gathered into the Evergetinos, copied in the Greek and Slavonic Paterika, and read down to the present on Mount Athos; in the Latin West it crossed over as the Verba Seniorum of the Vitae Patrum, where Poemen appears under the translated name Pastor (“shepherd”), and stands behind the chapter of St. Benedict’s Rule that commends “the Lives of the Fathers” to every monk. This file traces that single, branching inheritance as the patrimony of the undivided Church, not as a possession of either half of it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; master of discernment)

A Single Inheritance, Two Languages

Poemen the Great wrote nothing and founded no order. He survives entirely as sayings — the largest dossier in the alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum, some 187 numbered logoi under his name (Ward 1984, the Poemen series; Harmless 2004, ch. 5). The history of his memory is therefore the history of a book, or rather of a fluid, multiply-recensed body of sayings, and of the monks of every language who read it. That body of sayings is one of the very few texts that belonged, in the first millennium, to the entire monastic Church at once: it was compiled in Greek in a Palestinian milieu in the late fifth or early sixth century out of an oral, largely Coptic desert tradition, and from the Greek it passed into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, and Ethiopic in a vast branching transmission (Guy 1962/1984; Regnault 1999; Harmless 2004, ch. 5). The Latin and the Greek streams — the two that this file follows — are not rival traditions but two channels of one river, drawn off before the estrangement of Rome and Constantinople, and both reading the same Egyptian elder (on the undivided Church of this period, see Pre-Schism Church).

This is the frame within which the “East and West” of Poemen’s reception must be read. There is no “Roman Poemen” against an “Orthodox Poemen.” There is one Poemen, received in Greek by the Christian East and in Latin by the Christian West, in the centuries when East and West were one Church — and the differences between the two streams are differences of language, selection, and emphasis within a common patrimony (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004, ch. 12).

The East: the Apophthegmata as Monastic Bedrock

In the Greek-speaking East the Apophthegmata Patrum never became a museum piece; it became the foundational reading of the monastic life and stayed so. The sayings of the fathers — and Poemen’s above all, by sheer volume — furnished the working spiritual vocabulary of Byzantine monasticism: the “give me a word” relationship of elder and disciple, the teaching on the logismoi (thoughts) and on watchfulness, the discernment Poemen called the guide of the soul, and the mercy toward the fallen that is his signature (Ward 1984, the Poemen series; Regnault 1999; on the elder-disciple relation, see Spiritual Direction). The desert teaching the sayings carried became, through later systematizers, the substructure of the whole Eastern ascetic tradition — gathered and ordered by John Climacus in the Ladder, by Dorotheos of Gaza, and by Barsanuphius and John, and eventually folded into the Philokalia (Ware, in The Inner Kingdom; Harmless 2004, ch. 12; and see St. John Climacus).

The Evergetinos

The single clearest monument to Poemen’s place in Byzantine monastic reading is the Evergetinos (Synagōgē, the “Collection”), the great eleventh-century anthology of ascetic texts compiled by Paul, founder of the Monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis in Constantinople (d. 1054). The Evergetinos gathers sayings and excerpts of the fathers under topical headings — on the thoughts, on humility, on judging no one, on repentance — and draws very heavily on the Apophthegmata Patrum, so that the desert sayings, Poemen’s among them, are woven through it as primary material (Harmless 2004, ch. 12; Regnault 1999). The work became, and on Mount Athos remains, one of the standard ascetical handbooks of Orthodox monasticism, a principal channel by which the desert fathers reached later Byzantine and modern readers in organized form. To read the Evergetinos on discretion or on covering a brother’s fault is, in large part, to read Poemen re-sorted by topic.

The Greek and Slavonic Paterika

Beyond the Evergetinos, the sayings circulated in the East as Paterika (πατερικά, “books of the fathers”) — collections of the desert sayings that were among the most copied monastic texts of Byzantium and, after the conversion of the Slavs, of the Slavic world. The Greek alphabetical and systematic collections were translated into Church Slavonic early in the life of Slavic Christianity, and circulated under the names by which the Slavic monastic tradition knew them — the Skitskii Paterik (the “Sketis Paterikon,” corresponding broadly to the systematic collection) and the Azbuchnyi Paterik (the “Alphabetical Paterikon,” corresponding to the alphabetical collection in which Poemen’s dossier stands), along with the Egyptian and Roman (i.e., Verba Seniorum-derived) Paterika known in Slavonic translation (Harmless 2004, ch. 12; Regnault 1999; on the Slavonic Paterik tradition see further the studies of the Slavonic Paterika and their place in early Rus’ monastic libraries). These were not antiquarian texts but the formative reading of Slavic monks: the desert fathers, Poemen at their center, became the common ascetical schooling of Greek, Slav, and (later) Romanian and Georgian monasticism alike.

Mount Athos

On Mount Athos, the living center of Orthodox monasticism from the tenth century to the present, the Apophthegmata and its derivatives — the Evergetinos, the Paterika, the Philokalia — have remained continuous monastic reading. The Athonite tradition received Poemen not as a remembered ancient but as a present teacher whose words are read in the trapeza and the cell, and whose teaching on the thoughts and on the prayer of the heart stands behind the hesychast tradition the Holy Mountain preserved and defended (Ware, The Inner Kingdom; Harmless 2004, ch. 12; and see Monasticism and The Jesus Prayer). That continuity is the deepest sense in which Poemen “lives” in the East: not in a shrine but in the daily reading of monks who still come, as the sayings put it, for “a word.”

The West: the Verba Seniorum and “Abbas Pastor”

The Latin West received exactly the same desert and the same Poemen, in translation, and made the sayings a foundation of its own monasticism. The Latin recension of the Apophthegmata is the Verba Seniorum (“Sayings of the Elders”), gathered into the great corpus of the Vitae Patrum (“Lives of the Fathers”) that was assembled and printed across the late-antique and medieval centuries and edited, with the rest of the Vitae Patrum, in Migne’s Patrologia Latina (PL 73–74). Two of the most important early Latin translations of the systematic sayings are traditionally attributed to Pelagius the deacon (later, by tradition, Pope Pelagius) and John the deacon (later, by tradition, Pope John III), whose versions — the so-called Pelagius–John translation — form a principal layer of the Latin Verba Seniorum (PL 73; Ward 1984, introduction; Regnault 1999; Harmless 2004, ch. 12).

The detail that matters most for Poemen’s Western memory is one of language. The Greek name Poimēn (Ποιμήν) means “shepherd” — and the Latin translators did what translators do with a meaningful name: they translated it. In the Verba Seniorum Poemen appears not as “Poemen” but as Pastor — Latin for “shepherd,” the exact rendering of his Greek name — so that the sayings of “abbas Pastor” in the Latin tradition are the sayings of Poemen the Great under his name’s Latin equivalent (Ward 1984, introduction and the Poemen series, noting the Latin Pastor; Regnault 1999, who likewise notes the Latin rendering). This is a real source-critical point and not a trivium: a reader who meets “Abba Pastor” in a Latin florilegium, a medieval sermon, or an early printed Vitae Patrum is meeting Poemen, and the abundance of “Pastor” material in the Latin tradition is simply the Latin face of the same enormous Greek dossier. The single elder is thus doubly named across the two halves of the one Church — Poimēn in the Greek East, Pastor in the Latin West — and the two names cover one teacher.

Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 73

The clearest measure of how seriously the Latin West took this desert reading is the place the Apophthegmata and the Vitae Patrum hold in the foundational document of Western monasticism, the Rule of St. Benedict (c. 530–550). Benedict closes his Rule with a chapter, chapter 73, that presents the Rule itself as only a beginning — “a little rule for beginners” — and directs the monk who would press on toward perfection to the great monastic authorities beyond it. Among those he names explicitly are “the Lives of the Fathers [Vitas Patrum]” and “the Conferences” and “the Institutes” of Cassian, together with Holy Scripture and Basil (Rule of St. Benedict 73; trans. in the standard editions, e.g., RB 1980, ed. Fry). Benedict asks: “For what page or what utterance of the divinely inspired books of the Old and New Testaments is not a most unerring rule for human life? Or what book of the holy catholic Fathers does not loudly proclaim how we may by a straight course reach our Creator?” — and the Vitae Patrum, which carry the Verba Seniorum and so the sayings of abbas Pastor, are among the books he means (Rule of St. Benedict 73; RB 1980). Through this single chapter, the desert sayings — Poemen’s foremost among them — were commended to every monk formed in the Benedictine tradition, which is to say to the mainstream of Western monasticism for a thousand years.

The Western Florilegia and Later Spirituality

The Verba Seniorum did not stay shut in the Vitae Patrum. The Latin sayings were excerpted into the monastic florilegia — the compiled anthologies of ascetic wisdom that medieval houses copied and read alongside the Rule — and “Abba Pastor’s” sayings on discretion, on humility, on bearing with the weak, and on not judging passed into the common stock of Western monastic teaching, much as they had passed into the Eastern Evergetinos and Paterika (Harmless 2004, ch. 12; Regnault 1999). Through Cassian (whose Conferences and Institutes had carried Egyptian teaching to the Latin world a century before the Rule) and through the Verba Seniorum themselves, the desert ideal of discernment, compunction, and mercy became a permanent substrate of Western spirituality, surfacing later in the Cistercian recovery of the fathers and in the printed Vitae Patrum that fed early-modern Catholic devotion (Harmless 2004, ch. 12; Chitty 1966). The same Poemen who, in Greek, stands behind the Philokalia stands, in Latin, behind a long line of Western readers who knew him as Pastor.

One Patrimony

The reception of Poemen in East and West is, in the end, a single story told in two languages. The Greek tradition kept his name and made his dossier the bedrock of Byzantine and Slavic ascetic reading — the Evergetinos, the Skitskii and Azbuchnyi Paterika, the continuous reading of Athos. The Latin tradition translated his name to Pastor and made the same sayings part of the Verba Seniorum that Benedict’s Rule commends and the medieval florilegia diffused. Both streams flow from the one Egyptian desert, both were drawn off before the schism, and both carry the same teaching: discretion as the guide of the soul, weeping and self-accusation, and mercy toward the fallen. Poemen belongs, by the plain evidence of his transmission, to the whole Church that read him — and the East-and-West of his memory is best understood not as a division but as the breadth of a common inheritance (Ward 1984; Regnault 1999; Harmless 2004, ch. 12).

References

The Apophthegmata Patrum, alphabetical collection, Poemen series — cited by saying-number in Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984). Greek text in PG 65.
Ward, Benedicta, S.L.G. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Introduction on the recensions and the multilingual transmission; the Poemen series; the note that Poemen appears in the Latin tradition as Pastor, the Latin translation of the Greek Poimēn, “shepherd.”)
Verba Seniorum / Vitae Patrum, in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina 73–74. (The Latin recension of the Apophthegmata; the Pelagius–John translation of the systematic sayings; “abbas Pastor” for Poemen.)
Regnault, Lucien, O.S.B. The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers in Fourth-Century Egypt. Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1999 (French original Paris: Hachette, 1990); and Les Sentences des Pères du désert (Solesmes). (The transmission of the sayings into the Latin, Slavonic, and other versions; the Latin Pastor; the Evergetinos and Paterik tradition.)
Harmless, William, S.J. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, esp. ch. 5 (Poemen and the Apophthegmata) and ch. 12 (the afterlife of the desert literature in the Evergetinos, the Philokalia, the Verba Seniorum, and Western monasticism).
Guy, Jean-Claude, S.J. Recherches sur la tradition grecque des Apophthegmata Patrum. Subsidia Hagiographica 36. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1962; 2nd ed. 1984. (The Greek recensions and their relation to the Latin and other versions.)
The Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 73 (“That the Whole Observance of Perfection Is Not Set Down in This Rule”), commending the Vitae Patrum (Lives of the Fathers), Cassian’s Conferences and Institutes, Basil, and Scripture. Cited in RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and English with Notes, ed. Timothy Fry, O.S.B. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1981).
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966 (the desert tradition and its diffusion East and West; Cassian as the bridge to the Latin world).
Ware, Kallistos (Metropolitan of Diokleia). The Inner Kingdom (Collected Works, vol. 1). Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The desert fathers and their place in the continuous Orthodox ascetic and hesychast tradition.)